In floor and industrial vehicles such as forklift trucks, a high degree of maneuverability is essential to allow the vehicle to operate most effectively in small spaces. One of the requisites of such high maneuverability is an extremely small turning radius and this, of course, requires that the steering assembly for the vehicle permit a maximum angular displacement of each of the steerable wheels.
While steering assemblies which permit such high degrees of maneuverability and large-angle displacement of the wheels are known, they generally require complex mechanisms of relatively large size, two disadvantages for such industrial vehicles.